nintendo SPD

i squeezed in a few quick games to round out the year. i’m a pretty big fan of the warioware series, and next up for me was warioware: snapped! for DSiware. i’d read a fair amount about the game before i bought it and knew that it was going to have limited appeal; the reviews at nintendolife and gamespot.com are pretty typical.

as an entry in the warioware series the game would be fairly disappointing due to its limitations, chief of which is its short length (about 20 micro-games, 5 of which require coordination with a second person) and the lack of any extras: you can easily breeze through the game in less than half an hour. i didn’t have too much trouble getting the camera to recognize me, but my nephew and i weren’t able to get through all of the 2-player set even after several attempts.

the game’s camera-based controls are enjoyable and novel, although the playstation’s eyetoy that preceded it by more than 5 years and microsoft’s kinect released a year and a half later no doubt has featured similar games. and despite the always enjoyable wacky warioware exterior, the game as a whole does have a tech demo feel, as many critics have noted. but a large part of the real enjoyment of the game is showing it off to other people, not just for the trademark warioware goofiness, but for the recap at the end of each stage that replays recorded footage of the player. it’s a pity that you don’t have any option to save these silly antics, but the iwata asks article about the game sheds some light on both the practical and emotional motivations for this seemingly odd design choice, motivations that are probably much more relevant to japanese societal norms than those of the US.

in terms of a recommendation, though, for people other than completists and hard-core fans of the series, making the decision to shell out $5 for this game really comes down to how much you’re willing to pay for a mechanism to entertain your friends and watch them being entertained. (in that sense the game is much like the somewhat infamous muscle march for wiiware.) in my case the combination of that enjoyment along with the appeal of warioware makes this an unregretted purchase, despite its limited gameplay and use, but for an introduction to the warioware series in general there are clearly better choices.